The latest version of the Zend Framework has officially been released - version 1.8, the first in the 1.8.x series with lots of new features including components encouraging the rapid application development functionality the framework already has and additional features to make it easier to use ZF in "the cloud".

I'm pleased to announce the Zend Framework 1.8.0 release, the first in our 1.8 series of releases. This release marks the culmination of several long-standing projects, as well as a formalization of many of our recommended practices.

The new rapid application development features include something that's been a long time coming, Zend_Tool. It gives you a command-line interface to build out ZF project parts and configure/display settings for them. Zend_Application was also released in relation to provide a standardized way for boostraping applications with either default configurations or custom settings.

Since cloud computing use has been on the rise, the ZF development team has added in two new components - interfaces for Amazon's Simple Storage Service and the Elastic Compute Cloud.